Pluralistic: Firing the refs doesn't end the game (12 Mar 2025)


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A cross-section of the head of a man who is wide-eyed and screaming. The head is elongated and is being sucked into a black hole.

Firing the refs doesn't end the game (permalink)

Let me tell you how I became a proud science denier, and how it saved my life.

It was about 15 years ago. I was living in London, and my wife's job came with a private health insurance buff that let us use private doctors instead of the NHS. I've had worsening chronic pain my whole life, and I've never found anything that made it better, so I thought, fine, I'll see a fancy specialist. So I started calling around to the quacks of Harley Street, London's elite medical precinct.

Soon, I found myself at the very posh offices of a psychopharmacologist who had good news for me: Opioids are safe! Far safer than we'd ever thought. So safe, in fact, that I should get on opioids right away, and take them every day for the rest of my life. I didn't have to worry about addiction. I'd be fine. He had a whole pile of peer-reviewed journal articles that supported this advice.

I didn't trust the science. I suspected that billionaire-owned pharma companies were engaged in a conspiracy to cook the evidence on the safety and efficacy of their products. I thought that the regulators who were supposed to prevent them from murdering me for money were in on the game – on the take, swapping favors for these companies for a promise of cushy industry jobs after they left the public sector.

I did my own research. I found people online who were citing other research from outside the establishment that confirmed my conspiracy theory. I decided that these strangers on the internet were more trustworthy than the respected, high-impact factor, peer-reviewed, tier-one scientific journals whose pages were full of claims about the safety and efficacy of daily opioid use for chronic pain sufferers like me. I took control over my own health. I didn't fill the Rx for the medicine my doctor had prescribed for me and advised me to start taking immediately. I fired my doctor.

I took these steps despite having no background in pharmacology, addiction studies, or medicine. I was totally unqualified to make that call. I was a science denier – but I was also right.

It probably saved my life.

A decade later, I found myself facing another medical question: should I get a new kind of vaccine, which was claimed to be effective against the covid-19 pandemic? The companies that manufactured that vaccines were part of the same industry that falsified the research on opioids. The regulators that signed off on those vaccines were the same regulators that signed off on opioid safety claims. Neither had ever been forced to reckon with the failures that led to the opioid epidemic. The procedures that allowed that shameful episode were the same, and the structures that allowed the perversion of those procedures were likewise the same. And once again, there was a clamor of dissenting voices from people who distrusted the official medical position on these new pharma products, insisting that they were the creations of pharma billionaires who didn't care if I lived or died, overseen by regulators who were utterly in their pockets.

I got the vaccine, and then several more. But I tell you what: I had no more rational basis to trust vaccines than I had for mistrusting opioids. I am not qualified to evaluate the scientific claims related to either question, and I know it.

This is an objectively very frightening situation to be in.

We navigate so many of these life-or-death technical questions every single day:

  • Is my Boeing plane airworthy?

  • Are the air traffic controllers adequately trained, staffed and rested?

  • Is the firmware for my antilock brakes of high quality?

  • Are the hygiene procedures at this restaurant robust enough to prevent the introduction of life-threatening pathogens and contaminants?

  • Are the pedagogical theories at my kid's school well-founded, or are do they produce ignoramuses whose only skill is satisfying standardized testing rubrics?

  • Are the safety standards that specify the joists in my ceiling any good, or am I about to die, buried under tons of rubble?

Every one of these questions is the sort of thing that even highly skilled researchers and experts can – and do – disagree on. Definitively answering just one of these questions might require the equivalent of several PhDs. Realistically, you're not going to be able to personally arrive at a trustworthy answer to all of these, and it's very likely you won't even be able to answer any of them.

That's what experts are for. But that just raises another problem: how do you know which experts you should listen to?

You don't.

You can't. Even experts who mean well and are well-versed in their fields can make mistakes. For every big, consequential technical question, there are conflicts, both minor and major, among experts who seem to be qualified and honest. Figuring out which expert to trust is essentially the same problem as answering the question for yourself.

But despite all these problems, you are almost certainly alive as you read these words. How did that happen?

It's all down to referees. In our public policy forums, we entrust publicly accountable bureaucrats to hear all the claims of all the experts, sift through them, and then publish a (provisional) official truth. These public servants are procedurally bound to operate in the open, soliciting comments and countercomments to a public docket, holding public hearings, publishing readouts of private meetings with interested parties. Having gathered all the claims and counterclaims, these public servants reason in public, publishing not just a ruling, but the rationale for the ruling – why they chose to believe some experts over others.

The transparency obligations on these public servants – whom we call "regulators" – don't stop there, either. Regulators are required to both disclose their conflicts of interest, and to recuse themselves where those conflicts arise.

Finally, the whole process has multiple error-correction systems. Rules can be challenged in court on the grounds that they were set without following the rules, and the expert agencies that employ these regulators have their own internal procedures for re-opening an inquiry when new evidence comes to light.

The point of all this is to create something that you, me, and everyone we know can inspect, understand and verify. I may not have the cell biology chops to evaluate claims about MRNA vaccine safety, but I am equipped to look at the process by which the vaccines were approved and satisfy myself that they were robust. I can't evaluate the contents of most regulations, but I can certainly tell you whether the box the regulation shipped in was made of square cornered, stiff cardboard:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

That's why the vaccine question was so tough. The opioid crisis had shown the procedure to be badly flawed, and the fact that neither the FDA nor Congress cleaned house after that crisis meant that the procedure was demonstrably faulty. Same goes for getting in a 737 MAX. The issue isn't that Boeing made some mistakes – it's that the FAA lets Boeing mark its own homework, even after Boeing was caught cheating:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

I'm not qualified to tell you how many rivets a jet plane's door-plug should have, but I can confidently say that Boeing has demonstrated that it doesn't know either, and the FAA has demonstrated that it has no interest in making Boeing any better at resolving this question.

It's no coincidence that our political process has been poisoned by conspiratorialism. America's ruling party is dominated by conspiracy fantasists who believe in all kinds of demonstrably untrue things about health, public safety, international politics, economics and more. They were voted in by an electorate that is similarly in the grips of conspiratorial beliefs.

It's natural to focus on these beliefs, but that focus hasn't gotten us anywhere. Far more important than what the Republican base believes is how they arrive at those beliefs. The Republican establishment – politicians, think-tankies, pundits, newscasters – have spent decades slandering expert agencies and also corrupting them, making them worse at their jobs and therefore easier to slander.

Market fundamentalism insists that "truth" is to be found in markets: if everyone is inserting radium suppositories, the government's has no business forcing you to stop stuffing radioactive waste up your asshole:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

Rather than telling restaurants how often their chefs should wash their hands, we can let markets decide – merely require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, and then diners can vote with their alimentary canals. To the septic goes the spoils! Of course, the government also has no business deciding whether their disclosures are truthful – isn't that why we have a First Amendment? So while we might require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, we're not going to send the signage cops down to the diner to bust a restaurant for lying about those procedures.

The twin assault on both the credibility and reliability of expert agencies came to a head with the Loper Bright decision, in which the Supreme Court gutted expert agencies' rulemaking ability, seemingly in the expectation that Congress – overwhelming populated by very old people who trained as lawyers in the previous century – would make fine-grained safety rules covering everything from water to aerospace:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

Conspiratorialism is the inevitable outcome of a world in which:

a) You have to resolve complex, life-or-death technical questions which;

b) You are not qualified to answer; and

c) Cannot trust the referees who are supposed to navigate these questions on your behalf.

Conpsiratorialism is only secondarily about what you believe. Mostly, conspiratorialism is about how you arrive at those beliefs. Conspiratorialism isn't a problem of bad facts – it's a problem of bad epistemology.

We live in a true epistemological void, in which the truth is increasingly for sale.

That's the backdrop against which Doge is doing its dirty business. Doge's assault on expert agencies enjoys a depressing degree of popular support, but it's not hard to understand why: so many of our expert agencies have staged high-profile demonstrations of their unfitness, without any consequences, that it's easy to sell the story that these referees were all on the take.

They weren't, of course. Most expert regulators – career civil servants – really care about their jobs. They want to make sure you can survive a trip to the grocery story rather than shitting your guts out with listeria or giardia, that your plane doesn't collide with a military chopper, that your kids graduate school knowing more than how to pass a standardized test. The tragedy is that these honorable, skilled regulators' commitment to your wellbeing isn't enough to produce policies that actually safeguard your wellbeing.

Musk doesn't want to fix the real, urgent problems with America's administrative state: he wants to destroy it. He wants to fire the refs, because once you fire the refs, the game goes on – minus the rules. That's a great way to win support for authoritarian projects: "The state won't take care of you anymore (if it ever did, amirite?), but I will."

So they're firing the refs, and they're transforming the game of "survive until tomorrow" into Calvinball, a "nomic" in which the rules are whatever someone insists they are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

Musk and Trump are in for a surprise. They have the mistaken impression that the rules only reined in their billionaire pals and the corporations that produce their wealth. But one of the most consequential effects of these rules is to limit labor activism. The National Labor Relations Act put very strict limits on union organizing and union militancy. Now that Trump has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board (by illegally firing a Democratic board member, leaving the board without a quorum), all bets are off:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

Trump won office in part by insisting that America's institutions were not fit for purpose. He wasn't lying about that (for a change). The thing he was lying about was his desire to fix them. Trump doesn't want honest refs – he wants no refs. To defeat Trumpism, we need to stop pretending that our institutions are just fine – we need to confront their failings head on and articulate a plan to fix them, rather than claiming "America was already great":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago AIM contract takes your privacy https://web.archive.org/web/20050303010141/http://www.aim.com/tos/tos.adp

#10yrsago NYPD caught wikiwashing Wikipedia entries on police brutality https://web.archive.org/web/20150313150951/http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8563947/edits-wikipedia-pages-bell-garner-diallo-traced-1-police-plaza

#10yrsago Portland cops charge homeless woman with theft for charging her phone https://www.streetroots.org/news/2015/03/06/homeless-phone-charging-thief-wanted-security

#5yrsago Locked-down Siennese sing their city's hymn https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#canto-verbena

#5yrsago Malware that hides behind a realtime Covid-19 map https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#co-evolution

#5yrsago Trump's unfitness in a plague https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#public-choice-nihilism

#5yrsago Rep Katie Porter forces CDC boss to commit to free testing https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#katieporter

#5yrsago Chelsea Manning is free https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#chelseafree

#5yrsago Where I Write https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#whereiwrite

#5yrsago Announcing the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#attack-surface

#1yrago Bullies want you to think they're on your side https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/13/hey-look-over-there/#lets-you-and-he-fight

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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